Word count:11214
hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about how to be funny the psychology of humor what I want to give you here is a very practical guide for how to up your humor especially for guys who are very logical and very analytical and very serious minded they have a serious minded attitude towards life because I was personally that way not too long ago and I underwent a journey of my own to transform that and the reason I did that was because it was necessary for me to get better results with attracting girls in this episode what you're going to get is you're going to get a bit of a bit of my backstory you're gonna get some theory about what funniness is how humour actually works we're going to take a look at your own psychology and what within your own psychology is holding you back from being more humorous naturally and then I'm going to give you various categories of humor lots of specific examples from my own life of how I used humor and I'm going to give you three powerful exercises that you can use to actually drill this into your mind so we have a lot to talk about so let's get right into it why is humor important well might seem self-evident but there are actually more factors than you might initially think I think the most important factor is that it helps you with your a man to attract girls now here I'm going to kind of be assuming that I'm dealing with a male audience and that you're trying to use this humor to be more likeable especially with girls although the principle that I talked about here could be used by anyone in any context this is not just for in the nightclub or on a date or with your girlfriend you can use this if you're a girl you can use this in business context you can use it everywhere this is a very flexible skill but especially with girls it's just a killer skill killer skill another important area where it's going to be great for you is just with socializing being friendly and being friendly in different contexts so it could be with friends when you're just drinking beers at the bar or it could be in a work environment it could be in a social networking environment it could be in a professional environment doesn't matter where this is a very powerful skill you can use humor to build really deep connections to really open doors that would otherwise never be open for you you can use humor as a way to manipulate people you can use humor to really get your way in life where otherwise you wouldn't get your way so very powerful humor is also very powerful if you're in sales or if you're in marketing if there's stuff you got to sell if there's a presentation got to give if you got to convince someone of something it's a lot easier to get your way when you're humorous about it and when people like you and perhaps the most important reason which nobody really thinks about is simply your own happiness and well-being if you're a person who's going through life and you're dead serious all the time the way that I was and you have a stick up your ass the way that I did and you're afraid to socialize with people and you've got four or five layers of mental filters for every sentence that you speak from your mouth that means before sentence can come out you filter it four times to make sure that it doesn't upset someone or that it it's not embarrassing or weird or you're not going to get judged for it if you've got all this going on you're actually not happy on the inside because you feel like your authentic self isn't allowed to flourish in fact this might be such a bad state for you like it was for me that you don't even know this is going on for you and you might have developed this kind of a stigma where you tell yourself like oh well I'm just not a very humorous person my whole life people have told me that I'm kind of dry and I'm kind of boring and maybe I'm a nerd and all this kind of stuff and you feel like well can you help me can you help that type of person and my answer is yes I can because that's exactly who I was and still am I'm a really nerdy person so you can get some really powerful ideas here here's the number one trick the big picture of what you got to do to become funny is you have to start to change the entire lens through which you see the world right now if you've got a bad sense of humor it's because you're looking at the world through this lens where everything is dead serious and everything is very analytical logical and pragmatic so that means whenever you move your lips it's to get something utilitarian across to somebody else like hey can you go get me my car or can you loan me some money or can you do this thing at work it's just very dry matter-of-fact type of conversation which leaves no room for funniness you can't get funniness that way and the chances are that you've been doing this for so long you've been looking at life through this filter of seriousness for many years maybe several decades now that it's going to be very difficult for you to shift out of this and to reach this tipping point where your lens moves away the serious lens moves away and in a new limb lens comes into focus which is the lens of looking at life and seeing humor and absurdity and silliness in almost every situation no matter how mundane it is that's the big picture key now the question is how do you actually do this and what you're going to discover if you're an analytical person the way that I was you're kind of shy you're very logical very serious that is going to be quite challenging to do this shift in lenses that's going to be difficult but it's necessary because until you get this shift what I found in my own life personally is that it's very difficult for you to be humorous and you try too hard at it and basically you're too anxious about it and it kind of backfires on you so it's very important I would say that you make the flip happen make this shift happen in your lenses and I'm going to tell you how to do that but it's going to take some effort from you you're not going to do it just by finishing this one episode you're going to have to do some practice to follow this up and not just a week of practice not just a month of practice but at least 12 months or more of practice but think of it this way you got to really ask yourself how badly do you want this skill of being funny how valuable is it to you now you might think about it like well being funny you know uh there's a lot of other stuff in my life that I could put my attention and energy into twelve months of practice you know wouldn't it be better to just put that into my job or into my career into my relationship something like that and I would say hold on a minute maybe you're looking at this from the wrong perspective maybe actually being funny is a really critical and key skill in life for you I would suggest that it is if you really think about all the ramifications that it could have if you just develop this skill you're going to really be much better at attracting women you're going to be much better social you can be much more comfortable socially you're going to be able to make business connections that you otherwise would never have been able to make you're going to be better at sales you're going to be happier on the inside so there's a lot of benefits you're going to be able to get your way in life more easily so is that worth the investment I kind of need to convince you that it is because otherwise you're not going to do the work to get the shift to make it effortless right humor is supposed to be effortless and that's kind of what I experienced in my own life is about three or four years ago I decided that hey you know I've been very antisocial my whole life in high school and in college I didn't really interact with people much at all I was very focused on work I was very focused on my academics on my grades and I really good at that and I was very much in my head and I played a lot of video games and that's where I was and unfortunately after eight years of that high school and college I was kind of left socially inept unable to date unable to be friendly with guys at the bar and this was a problem for me right big problem by the way before I forget there's an important point I wanted to make about why this skill is so important for you if you're a man having humor is very important for you much more so than it is for women not only because you can attract women with it but actually because you can use it as a form of power it's a way to manipulate and if you want to be a powerful leader you need to have a sense of humor it's very difficult to be a powerful leader if you have no charisma and if you're just very dry all the time and you can't make a joke to save your life it's very hard to follow that kind of person into battle great leaders are usually pretty good at making jokes and in fact they're so strategic about making jokes and little quips and zingers that they can put other people into their place they can establish status their higher statuses and scent is essentially established through humor which is I think one of the deep evolutionary reasons why women are attracted to men who are humorous not simply because they can make the woman feel good I mean that's certainly a plus but because it shows that a man who is so confident socially he has social power and he has social status and that's something that women find very attractive so anyways back to my story right so I was this very socially inept guy after college and after a while basically I had to say okay I got to fix this problem and I started getting into the dating scene and I started learning about how dating works and I got involved with pickup for a few years then I went pretty hardcore with pickup and just learned a lot of theory and tried a lot of different stuff and got a lot of insights but basically what happened for me is eventually I was able to reach this point at first it was very challenging but eventually I reached the point where my analytical lenses and my serious lens it all kind of melted and I could start to see humor effortlessly in every situation and I've been very well served by that and there's still more growth that I can do there but that's really something that I want for you here so I want to share how you can do that for yourself so how do we do that for you well basically what we need to do is we to unwire your logical serious attitude we need to make you more emotional and more spontaneous less controlling of yourself less self-conscious we also need to give you a more relaxed internal state you cannot be humorous from an anxious place you're not going to be very humorous if you're depressed if you're angry all the time if you hate your life so one of the deeper fixes for this is to actually go improve your life so that you're happier in your life happy people will naturally say funny happier things right if you're seriously depressed you're probably these these little tricks that I give you here might not be enough to fix you you might need to fix the depression first before you do that so you're relaxed also if you're for example talking to a girl and you're trying to say humorous things to a girl you're going to find that you're going to lose all your humor abilities if you're talking to a girl and you're nervous to her because like you feel like oh my god she's this hot girl I need to impress her and all that kind of stuff if you have this approach anxiety that they call it it's gonna be very very hard for you to be humorous because in that anxious state you're not relaxed enough to let the spontaneous humor come through and humor the best kind is spontaneous it's not canned material all the stuff I'm going to be sharing with you here these are going to be like a skill set that you develop so you're not going to be using canned lines or funny jokes that you read on the internet somewhere I'm talking about the real skill of being humorous which is completely flexible and adaptable and works in every situation for that to happen we need to also remove your verbal filters this is hard to believe but you have many layers of verbal filtering going on all the time which prevent you from saying the things that you really think and this makes you non humorous this is very natural because we live it we live in a society and probably you grew up in a family where there are certain things that you weren't allowed to say certain things that would offend other people certain things that were politically incorrect or sacrilegious or whatever maybe you even got slapped for saying something you shouldn't when you were a kid and now basically you've got all this filtering going on which prevents you from being authentic prevents you from just being blunt and it prevents you from being goofy and that's another thing we need to work on is your willingness to be goofy right so some guys one of the problems that they have in something that I had is that like you walk into the club and you're gonna have fun with girls here and you're maybe going to try to pick a girl up or something you know say something funny but you walk in there with this kind of attitude like you're James Bond like you're this cool suave sophisticated untouchable uh like very masculine kind of dude and you have no smile on your face you're kind of robotic and you think that that's what girls are into and you think that you can be humorous from that kind of place but actually you can't the best place to be humorous from is a goofy place imagine your body being all loose like a monkey imagine a big grin on your face imagine weird facial expressions imagine looking silly imagine people looking at you and thinking that you're a total goofball clown you have to be good get comfortable with that image right because that involves you being judged that means that there could be situations where you might do something embarrassing or shameful or stupid looks silly and you have to be okay with that and that's something you have to kind of work through in your mind right to be okay with that everyone has a unique and natural sense of humor this is what I've discovered I thought that like well maybe some people are more humorous than others and while it's probably true that some people are naturally a little more humorous and others I think we all have a sense of humor the problem is that most people have been kind of beaten down by society and told no so many times and we've been so serious and analytical for our whole lives that we've lost touch with it so if you feel like you don't have a natural sense of humor I would I would just caution you not to jump to a conclusion there and to limit yourself with that belief leave the possibility open that maybe in fact even though right now you're kind of a nerd and you're analytical and you don't think that you're funny and there's no history of you being funny in the past leave the possibility open that you could actually develop into a really humorous individual that's what I found I was able to do in my own life it's really hard for you to believe like it was for me that fear could be stifle in you so much that you have lost touch with your sense of humor your natural sense of humor it seems like yes leo I mean I could be afraid of certain things in social situations but am I really so afraid that like I'm not this like super witty super uproariously funny guy and the answer is yes that's what I found is that actually yes that's the case if we totally loosen you up like if we took you out for a night on the town and it was just like fun and rambunctious --mess for eight hours straight and we got you drunk and we just got you to do silly things and we were doing in this very social context where everyone was approving of you and everyone was cheering you on what would happen is that you would be extremely humorous by the end of that night simply because you have put yourself into such a emotionally a playful place by the other night that just like brilliantly likey you will be more hilarious than a stand-up comedian it's quite shocking and you can actually test this out and see that this will be true but you know you can't always go through that kind of process so we're going to talk about some details now about the structure of humor what is humor really why do people laugh this is actually a pretty deep question and thinkers throughout history philosophers in fact have actually asked this question since the Greeks and Romans the the ancient and they've wondered like you know what makes people laugh it's a pretty interesting phenomenon because as far as I'm aware no other animal in the animal kingdom laughs pretty interesting so why do humans laugh and one prevailing theory that I like is that the reason humans laugh is because it releases tension which is built up right throughout the execution of the joke or whatever the funny situation is so laughing is like a release of tension and it's really interesting because laughing is not a conscious behavior it's an unconscious behavior we can't really control what's funny to us and what's not it just happens automatically that's one of the beautiful things about laughter is that you can just let yourself go and laugh and have a great time but more practically how do we create humor the way we create humor is by setting up a situation where something unexpected or jarring happens this is how all humor works so there's a certain situation or context or someone is delivering some lines to you of words and you're kind of expecting one thing you're kind of being taken in one direction and then in a split second there's the punchline and there's this kind of reversal and expectations and it's like oh it's not what I was thinking and it becomes funny to you and you start to laugh to release tension that was built up in that situation so that's basically how all humor works now there's lots of different specific categories of humor and I want to cover some of the basics here and I want to give you examples so I'm gonna give you examples across all these categories from my own personal life so these were some of the most funny moments that I can remember and I mean I've said a lot of funny [ __ ] going out a lot I've gone to a lot of nightclubs spend a lot of nights going out and some nights you know we're just terrible I was just awful but then some of the stuff I said was just like pure gold so I'm going to give you some examples of that here all right so the first category is what I call ridiculous this scenarios what this means is that basically you come up with a ridiculous scenario and you verbalize it to the person or group of people that you're talking to and you can really take it to ridiculous proportions in fact the more ridiculous the more unexpected it is the more jarring it is and the more funny it is so what are some examples of this and by the way this is one of my favorite categories because I think is one of the easiest ones to work with so one time I remember I was in a club and I saw this girl and I was just in such a good mood I walked up to her and I just immediately started talking about something like this I said hey you know we would have the most amazing children together in fact if we had a baby girl I would tell her that she should become a porn star or a stripper because she would just be beautiful she'd be the most beautiful girl in the world we would want to make her a porn star and we had a baby boy he would be an ass model on the cover of magazines known all over the world for his beautiful ass so that's an example for you right there and then I just kept kind of going with it and making it more and more ridiculous so as you can see in this example I start off kind of plausible it's like we would have amazing kids and that's that's already a little bit presumptuous of me to say that to someone I just met random stranger but then I just take it to ridiculous levels and it becomes ridiculous especially when I start talking about how a girl is going to become a porn star right why is this funny because usually when parents have a child and the child is beautiful and it's a girl it's like they think that is this little angel that they have and they want her to be everything except a porn star so how funny would it be if the parents actually wanted her to become a porn star that would be hilarious so basically that's kind of the the expectation I was playing against in that example here's another example and this is a slight twist on ridiculous scenarios and this is giving a ridiculous compliment so let's say you're a guy and you're talking to a girl you want to compliment her usually guys would give up a corny compliment like hey you've got beautiful eyes no that's that's that's that's very chumpy instead give her a compliment like this and this is one that I used and I got a really good reaction one time I said oh my god you are the cutest thing ever you are cuter than a baby polar bear sliding down a rainbow into a pot of gold over an emerald green pasture with a unicorn in the background covered in rainbow sprinkles so that's quite a mouthful but the point behind that example is that it's a compliment but at the same time it's just so ridiculous and over-the-top and every additional thing I say is just even more ridiculous in the previous thing and it's just you know you can't keep a straight face even just saying that that line it's hilarious so actually when I said that to this girl she she was laughing so hard she had instead of talking to me she actually ran off to grab her friend and she brought her girlfriend over and asked me to repeat the compliment to her girlfriend because she thought it was so funny so I'm you know there you go just an example right there another example and this is also a slight twist is in more ordinary situations let's say you're not at the club or calm chill situation maybe for example you're with your girlfriend or even with your wife and you want to be a little funny with her what do you do well one time I was walking down an aisle at Whole Foods and I saw these really ugly yoga pants you know those yoga pants that they sell at those organic food markets so I saw some of those yoga pants there and this particular one just had this awful pattern on it just totally hideous no one would ever want to be seen with this so I texted the girl that I was seeing at the time and I said something like ha ha ha I said something like oh I found you the perfect pair of pants and then I texted her a picture of those pants so again it was ridiculousness being played out right so I actually take my time to look for the ridiculous around me as I'm sitting somewhere if I'm bored if I'm on a cell phone if I'm walking through this Supermarket if I'm in a club if I'm looking at a girl this is where I'm talking about again training your filter to look for the ridiculous in the mundane and this this takes a bit of practice what's cool about is you can literally train yourself by looking around you wherever you are and find something ridiculous about the situation also what you can do is you can just concoct ridiculous situations out of thin air right so it doesn't have to be handed to you on a silver platter you can just literally come up with ridiculous situations just like like literally it's just like fantasy you just come up and just keep adding more and more and more and more to it kind of like I was doing with the the baby polar bear sliding down the rainbow and just kind of adding more and more crap to it and it just became funny after a while okay so the next category is role-playing this is a powerful category what you do is you assume a role as though you're an actor and then you pick a funny role for yourself that you're going to play so two favorite roles that I have that I like to play is the Garrett the arrogant [ __ ] or the arrogant King and the Deva so the arrogant King is is a favorite of mine so basically you walk into the place and you act as though everything that comes out of your mouth is as though you're the king or tyrants of this establishment so here's an example of how this was go let's say I'm in a club that means I walk in and I'm a very cocky I hold this very cocky regal pose and I walk up to people and I kind of expect them to initiate conversations with me and kiss my hand as though I'm this King right like they really respect me and then let's say a girl starts talking to me and I'm talking to her and I'm listening to her and then when she's done talking I would say very well you have done well my subject you have earned the privilege to feed me grapes at dinner time as naked women fan me with palm fronds from this scorching heat that we're in so something like this right you kind of act like you're this King and like it's very cocky and arrogant but you do it in this way where it's pretty obvious to people that you're acting and that can be funny you can also play the diva so a lot of times girls will play divas especially hot girls they want everything done for them and they they expect everything the best you know they expect the best luxuries and they expect you to treat them nicely and all this kind of stuff and it's like nothing is ever good enough for them so you can take on that role yourself and actually preamp the girl so if you're with a hot girl and you're a guy one thing you can do is you can act the diva and everything she does like it's not good enough for you and it's like no I wanted better I want it faster I wanted bigger you know like this like you're not satisfied with anything but you do it in a playful way not in a critical way and so that can be a fun role those are just two roles you can come up with many other types of funny roles and what's cool about roles is that not only are you kind of like making other people laugh but most importantly in primary is that you're making yourself laugh in this role it's almost as though you're being a rascal and you're playing pranks on people you're just kind of walking around and you're playing this role and other people don't even know that you think that you're this King but in your mind you know just for this next 30 minutes you're going to be pretending and it's just kind of funny to you how people react so that can be a cool one another category of humor is self-deprecating humor this is a classic one and it can be really powerful I've got a really good example for this from my own life so one time my buddy and I we went to the Spearmint Rhino which is like a world-class strip club here in Las Vegas where I live and we went there we were just kind of hitting on the girls and it was a slow Tuesday night and we were cheap we didn't really want to pay for lap dances so we would sit there girls would come and sit on our laps and just kind of talk to us try to get us to buy lap dances but we were just kind of screwing around so I kind of just decided to see how far I could take it with a girl and just kind of attract her you know let's try to attract a stripper without paying or anything and so I'm you know sitting there thinking like what can I say to make her laugh and then and I was thinking like well guys always come here try to impress these strippers because strippers are just like gorgeous Spearmint Rhino has some of the most gorgeous strippers you'll you'll find in the world and uh and then it hit me and I'm like oh I know exactly the right the right thing to say so she comes over this asian girl comes over on my lap she's beautiful girl and and I asked her so uh you like guys with tiny penises right like guys with really small dicks and she's like looking at me and she's kind of like what I'm like yeah you know I'm this guy um it was a really tiny dick and I think you would really love me but tell me something do you have a boyfriend and she's like yeah and I'm like I'm you know I bet your boyfriend is like one of those macho guys who like goes to the gym has these huge biceps and stuff you know I don't have huge biceps and uh and I bet you're your boyfriend he has this huge massive dick because I know how much you strippers love massive dicks but have you ever considered dating a guy with a tiny dick like don't you ever get tired of getting banged by guys with giant dicks like I mean it's fun at first but then after a while I imagine that it gets kind of boring kind of annoying in fact right wouldn't you like to meet a guy with like a tiny micro penis like a little a little nub of pee like a half-inch er well that's what you got right here with me girl you don't know what you're missing out on and so I just keep going with this and so I'm basically combining self-deprecation and ridiculousness and I'm just kind of like ramping this up uh-huh by the time I was done with that she was just laughing her ass off and she sat there with me on my lab for like 40 minutes just talking to me after that because it was so hilarious and it demonstrated so much confidence for me here's the trick with self-deprecating humor if you're going to use it go really over-the-top with it because if you do a little a little weak self-deprecating humor then people might think like you're insecure about yourself but when you do really obnoxious over-the-top self-deprecating humor it's so hilarious that actually it makes you hyper confident because think about it from the girl's perspective she's kind of expecting that this guy he comes here he's not married attractive he probably wants to impress her with how cool his car is or how much money he makes or or how much business he does or something like that how muscular he is and you know how masculine he is so that's where she expects now when I come in there and I start telling her all you know the things about my tiny dick like to her that's completely out of her realice completely against everything she expected and that makes her laugh a lot and it shows that I'm very confident because I could sit there with a straight face and talk about my tiny dick which is what nobody would ever think of doing in a place like a strip club so that's what made it work so try that another category is blunt social commentary I'll give you an example of this last last spring I was at a meditation retreat and it was like this very intense four-day workshop where we did a lot of very like deep soul-searching work for meditation and enlightenment and you know we shared a lot of our deep histories and stuff about ourselves and our emotions and then at the end of that whole thing we were sitting in a circle on the last day and we were trying to just wrap everything up and what was interesting about that situation is that we weren't allowed to talk other than doing those exercises so really we knew nothing about each other we didn't even know our names and we didn't know like where we're from or where we worked or anything about ourselves so in a sense we kind of shared our hearts and we spilled out a lot of private intimate details but on the other hand we kind of didn't even know the most basic things about each other so we were sitting in that circle and we were about to all leave we flew in from different parts of the country and one of the women there she just says oh you know I would really like to know a little bit more about everybody here so why don't we just go in a circle and everyone say their name and say where they're from and maybe a sentence or two about what they do and she said all that kind of like offering it as a suggestion to us and I sat there and immediately in my mind the funny thing popped it because I was looking for fun and my mind found the funny and what it found funny was that I said this I said you know I think we should just treat this whole thing is a nice one-night stand so we don't want to spoil it by knowing too much about each other and when I said that the whole room just lit up in uproar is laughter and they laughed for good 20 seconds like it was it was really contagious laughter and the reason that worked because there was this this jarring juxtaposition of this kind of like very green very hippy environment that we were in we were sitting there very quietly meditating and stuff like that and everyone was very respectful and loving of everybody and here I bring sex into the situation I bring a one aisle you know a cheap dirty one-night stand into the situation I kind of I just opposed those two together and also it was like a authentic social commentary very subtly because in a sense what was special about this workshop we went through is that we didn't really know each other that's what made it good we were kind of like strangers and that's what makes the one-night-stand good is like we're kind of like strangers right so it was kind of true that people didn't really want to give out their names and all their personal details to fill in all the blanks we kind of liked leaving it open and leaving the mystery there so that got a lot of people laughing and actually my filter was on even more and what I what I caught on to is that some people are actually laughing so hard that it it's like in my mind it's like oh those people really know what I talk about what I want to talk about here with the one-night-stand and it was so funny because I could have immediately said and I didn't say this but I could have said this it's like wait a minute some of you were laughing way too hard at that joke implying that they had a lot of one-night stands when they were younger because this was this was also a group of like 50 and 60 year olds right so they usually don't talk about sex and one-night stands that much so it was a really funny situation that I could have made even more funny if I wanted to because my filter was open and I was looking for the funny and that's what I want you to kind of learn from this example is like if your mind is open it's looking for the funny it will find the funny you just need to release your filters and you also need to train your mind to look for funny and at first that's difficult but once you get it it's really worth it and it becomes effortless that's by the way how that funny friend that you have in class or that funny friend you have at work that's so charming and it seems like humor is so effortless to him how does he do it exactly this way he didn't train himself he probably did it just spontaneously but basically he learned how to change his filter to always look for the funny and not to then hold himself back from saying and just blurting it out let's give you some more examples so uh next category is random nonsense I love this category you can literally just say random complete nonsense to people and they will start laughing for example I've walked up to girls and just opened with I have the most amazing semen in the world you would love my semen and I just say that with a straight face and it's hilarious they start laughing and giggling because it's just such random it's just complete random nonsense and I just again I make it ridiculous by going over the top with it um I remember one time two girls were sitting at a bar and I was feeling a really great playful mood so I just walk up to them I just started the conversation with hey what do you girls think about glory holes I need your opinion on glory holes and I just started asking them about glory holes out of the blue and it's like it's the most ridiculous the most nonsensical conversation starter ever and it works beautifully so this especially works well when you completely completely remove all your filters this is also by the way why when you're when you're drunk you can be very humorous because your filters are removed by the alcohol and by the way everything I'm talking about here was said when I was completely sober I never drink and in fact in all the hundreds of nights that I went out to clubs talking to girls I virtually never drank so this [ __ ] was said totally sober in fact some of the things I said were so ridiculous that girls would just assume that I'm drunk when in fact I'm not which makes it even more funny to me the girls don't know it but to me it's even more funny okay let's move on to the next category the next category is play on words so if you're somewhat of a wordsmith and you have good grasp of the English language or whatever language you're doing your humor in you can make play on words and the English language is really great for this so if you have a strong verbal skill then this is one route you might want to go what's an example of this well let's say that a girl is telling me something funny and I want to tell her something like hey you're just absolutely ridiculous instead of saying you're absolutely ridiculous I would say something quirky like you're absolutely ridonculous you're a ridiculous donkey you're so ridiculous that you're redonkulous something like that and there could be a a million other examples that aren't coming to mind for me right now but you get the idea with that one the next category is breaking expectations and while I already said that breaking expectations is kind of the common thread between all humor here I mean a very specific thing I'll give you two examples to illustrate this both of them with with girls that I was kind of dating so I was aiding this one girl I was seeing her and we were having sex multiple times and then he got to this point where it was almost like she was getting this feeling that I'm kind of like using her for sex and so she came to me one one time at my hotel room and she's sitting there on my bed and she's kind of a little bit annoyed with me and she's she's kind of telling me something so Solio you're like you're using me like I'm just like your little [ __ ] you're using me like a little [ __ ] and then she was kind of waiting for a response from me and immediately my mind saw the funny in this and the funny was that she was so expecting me to go against that and to start defending myself like no baby I don't think you're a [ __ ] you're you're my little princess I'm gonna treat you right like she was expecting that for me so what I do you know I decided to go completely against the grain on that one so she tells me you're just treating me like a little [ __ ] and I said yeah pretty much with a little cheeky smile on my face and her jaw just like Oh her jaw just drops like it's shocking right pretty pretty blunt it's shocking but it's also hilarious so then she starts laughing about and we both start laughing about it's just funny it also kind of diffuses the situation so that's one example of breaking expectations another one also with the girl that I was sleeping with we were actually kind of lying in bed in the morning and we were just kind of like talking [ __ ] you know the way that you do and somehow we got on this topic of what would happen if a bear attacked her and I would have to come in there and rescue her and so she tells me something like well so if a bear attacked me then you would come in there and rescue me and then she expects me to kind of chime in there and confirm and say yeah you know I would I would be your valiant uh knight in shining armor I would come in there and I would beat down this bear and save the damsel in distress that's what she was expecting me to say but I saw that in my mind's like oh don't do that make it funny go against the grain on this one and so she tells me so a bear attacks me and you're gonna come save me and I say [ __ ] no I'm not gonna come save you bear are you kidding me bears are dangerous wild beasts all let the bear work on you and I'll just run away it's a [ __ ] bear you're talking about I'm not going to mess around with the bear so I went completely against the grain and again for a second her jaw just drops it oh you did not just say that like that's what she's saying it in her mind but then she starts laughing we both start laughing cuz it's so hilarious um and it's really good so breaking expectations is huge in fact you could just walk into every situation especially if you're talking to a girl and you want to make her laugh everything she says in your mind install the filter to say kind of the exact opposite of what she wants you to say break every expectation she has for how you should act and that will make her laugh hysterically and the final category I'm gonna give you is called physical humor so sometimes you're lost for words you don't know what to say you can just be goofy and funny physically funny facial gestures sticking your tongue out Oh or making some weird face just randomly out of the blue that's somebody is hilarious sometimes one thing that I'll do is if I'm in a nightclub you know in the nightclubs they have these styrofoam sticks that have lights in them they kind of light up and you can wave them around a lot of times girls will walk around and nightclubs with these sometimes what I do is I'll just grab one of those sticks and I'll put it down below my belt like it's my dick hanging out and I'll just walk around with this big thing hanging you know sticking out from from my belt and I just walk up to groups of girls and I just do kind of like a thrusting pelvis motion with this foam stick and I just say stroke it stroke it you know you want to stroke it and so I just kind of like do this jerking off motion and it it gets a variety of results half the girls are shocked and offended and the other half of the girls are laughing hilariously and and and a lot of girls will come over start to actually start stroking it and sucking it is hilarious so just like physical humor like that which is uh usually context-dependent you can know you can do that too so one key here that I want you to understand is that humor is highly situational and context dependent it's not like I'm walking in there with a pre crafted joke that I'm going to say it's not like a knock knock who's there joke and you say something funny that's lame humor the best humor is situational humor it's fluid and spontaneous and the only way you can get that is not by memorizing canned lines but replacing your filters when you have the funny filter on when you're looking for the absurd the ridiculous when you're looking for breaking expectations your mind will get good at finding that stuff and then when you remove your your filters for offending people or blurting stuff out or looking silly then you'll just blurt stuff out and it's going to come out funny so that's the whole key to humor is those two things let me give you one more powerful tip here I have a question that you can use in your mind to help you unlock the funniness in yourself unlocking the funniness here's the question write this one down what could I say in this situation to make it funny again what could I say in this situation to make it funny write that down and ask yourself that one question whenever you want to be humorous you have to train your mind to be asking that question all the time when you're interacting with other human beings even in the most mundane situations like maybe you're at a gas station and you're paying for a bottle of water it's not funny at all there's nothing absurd about the situation it's the most mundane situation now in your mind if you want to practice being humorous you ask yourself okay what could I say in this situation to make it funny and you force your mind to come up with something funny now here's the trick when you first start doing this it's going to seem very hard and it's going to feel impossible in certain situations you're going to say something like well leo is just a bottle of water at a gas station clerk there's nothing funny about it that's because you're funny filter isn't installed yet into your mind the funny filter will get installed by asking the question and forcing your mind to come up with answers it's a training process what I found is that I literally had to rewire how my whole mind works because usually my mind is not looking for the funny usually I'm very analytical you know I'm I'm doing some marketing or I'm writing some some blog post or I'm shooting a video or I'm thinking about some deep philosophical topic there's nothing funny in my mind that's looking for you know for anything humorous and when I do that for a long time I forget that humor is even possible but when I force myself to look for the funny over and over and over again and it's hard at first eventually what happens is that my mind starts finding the funny so now we're getting to the portion of this program where I'm telling you how to actually practice this this is how you practice it this is why I said at the beginning how bad do you want this skill if you want this skill you're going to have to go through the emotional labor of rewiring your whole mind the nice thing about it though is that if you do it once in your life then forever you're going to have that ability to be humorous spontaneous it's a very powerful ability so it's worth doing even though it'll take you some months or years to do so let me give you a few more tips on how to practice this I always say this if you're really serious about it you really want to fix this problem once and for all in your life make it your mission for the next 12 months to look for the funny in every situation you possibly can everywhere everywhere with friends with family with girlfriends with boyfriends with guy friends with co-workers everyplace look for the funny your mind will get better at it as you make that your mission and then you do the following 3 exercises so exercise number 1 I call it random sentence strings so here's what you do for 10 minutes straight you set a timer sit down in a quiet place alone by yourself and then for 10 minutes straight you're going to string together random sentences using the last word in one sentence to then start the next sentence so I'm going to give you an example right now so let's start with a random word first word that pops into my mind is water water is delicious for fish I just made a random sense in my mind now it sounds like a stupid sentence water is delicious for fish I don't even know if that makes any sense but I just blurted it out with no filters so water makes no sense for fish now fish is the last word in that sense I'm going to use fish to start my next sentence random sense fish smell like smelly vagina okay random just blurting it out a random sentence I'm not trying to be funny random sentence so now a vagina is the last word in that sense so vaginas are designed to create babies nothing funny about that but I just blurted it out babies uh babies are stinky and loud nothing funny about it I just blurted it out the last word is loud loud nightclubs are annoying as [ __ ] blurting it out [ __ ] and you just keep going right so that's the process the key with this exercise is that it's not so much teaching you how to be funny but it's removing your filters those filters that are preventing you from saying funny stuff you need to get very good at just blurting stuff out and not hesitating so this exercise will work great for that so you're going to do this exercise every single day for 10 minutes for at least 3 months straight and if you're very serious do it for the next 12 months you're going to have huge gains if you do this second exercise it's visualizations and affirmations I'm not going to go depth into depth on visualization and affirmations because I have whole videos that show you how to do that you can go search for those but basically I'm going to give you two visualizations and two affirmation statements that you can use very powerful so how you're going to do is like the following you're going to set a timer for five minutes and you're going to sit down and you going to do visualizations for five minutes and you're going to visualize the following thing number one is the following statement I see funniness everywhere I see funniness everywhere you're going to close your eyes you're going to visualize yourself going through every context in life at work at home in the family at the nightclub seeing funniness everywhere you can visualize that you're also going to do five minutes more of affirmations of that statement so I see funniness everywhere you're just going to say to yourself in your mind I see funniness everywhere I see funniness everywhere I see funniness everywhere for five whole minutes okay and then the second statement is I am a rascal it's a good one you're going to close your eyes for five minutes are going to visualize I am a rascal in every context of life picture yourself being a rascal and enjoying it and then you're gonna do five minutes more of affirmations I am a rascal and you're going to say to yourself in your mind I am a rascal I am a rascal I am a rascal for five minutes straight you're going to do these visualizations and affirmations for three months straight every single day don't dismiss how powerful this is this is what reprograms your mind very powerful and the final exercise is every situation that you're interacting with other human beings you're going to look for the funny scenarios in life everywhere every single sentence that you hear from someone's mouth you're going to ask yourself the question how could I make that situation funny how could I turn what they said and riff on it and make it funny and you can actually really take this to the next level by practicing on store clerks so if you really want to practice this with a live human being what you do is you go to a mall public mall go to a department store at the mall like Macy's go to the de cologne department where they have women or men selling you stuff and you just start up casual conversation as though you're interested in some cologne but then you ask her some questions about where she's from and how she got this job and you just sort a conversation and then you look for the funny and everything the single thing she says look for the funny and you try to riff on it and make her laugh what's really cool about that is that there's no pressure on you and she has no expectation that you're going to make her laugh and you're going to make her day better by doing that cuz she's bored out of her mind standing there for eight hours anyways and there's really no risk to you in this situation so you can go and practice that very easy for free you can also practice with your friends and your family if you have a girlfriend you can practice on her if you have a wife you could practice on her I love practicing this with girls that I date I'm talking to a girl if I'm skyping with a girl because I have a long-distance relationship or something literally I'm sitting there and everything she's telling me over Skype I'm just asking myself in my mind what's funny about that what's absurd about that what could I say that would make her laugh and my mind just gets better and better and better at coming up with the [ __ ] until for a few years it gets really good and the scales tip the ship happens my filter changes now I've got the funny filter on and I'm pretty humorous when I need to be it's quite remarkable how flexible your brain is and how much it will adapt and switch filters here so believe in yourself as you do these exercises I'm telling you that if you do this for the next even just three months you're going to have significant improvements and if you do it for 12 months you might become extremely humorous the most humorous person in your entire social circle is this is extremely powerful extremely powerful stuff don't get tricked into thinking that these techniques are very simple and kind of like lowbrow techniques you want something more sophisticated you want more sophisticated forms of humor know start with the most crass the most basic humor and the most basic techniques here these techniques these visualizations and the other stuff that I told you this will take you very very far all right before I go let me give you two important warnings warning number one is do not use canned lines this will kill your progress what you're trying to develop here is a skill and a rewiring of your entire mind you're trying to change these filters canned lines will not do this for you if you take the examples I gave you here and you just memorize them and you go up to girls and you tell them you might even get a few laughs here and there but you're not going to develop real humor you're not going to become a humorous individual you're going to become a line spouting robot and in fact they're going to be nervous when you're spouting those lines because you know what if I say that line wrong or what if I run out of lines and you will run out of lines and your lines will also not be context sensitive you're not going to have a line for every context so go for the bigger picture goal you want to develop this skill is a very powerful skill that you want to have in life especially if you're a man so it's worth doing the hard work to get it don't waste your time so much on canned lines I wasted a lot of my time memorizing canned lines and it didn't really help me become humorous the way that I wanted and the second warning I'm going to give you is you have to come at this whole thing from a sense of self amusement and not seeking validation so I'm not telling you to go out there and become a clown for the world because the world needs more clowns and because the world needs more humor no you're not trying to become a stand-up comedian nor are you trying to really make other people laugh that's not your job what you're doing here is you're developing this ability you're developing a new attitude towards life you're going to see life in a new way you're going to have more playfulness in your life that's fundamentally what you're doing here is you're building this kind of playfulness muscle because you're way too uptight you're too serious that's why you're not humorous you're not playful you're not letting yourself go it's almost like you want to be drunk your whole life it's like you're so loose when you're drunk imagine being that way your whole life but being sober at the same time it's not a paradox this can happen but you want to come at this from a place of self amusement so when you say something funny in a situation it's not to get a laugh it's not to get people to like you it's you expressing your joy for life that's what it is seems subtle but it's an important distinction so when you say things or do funny things it's mostly to amuse yourself and if other people laugh great if they don't who cares a lot of times they'll be offended they will that's okay you have to take that cost that's fine a lot of times they'll think you're stupid that's okay a lot of times I'm the happiest and I'm laughing the hardest on the inside when I do something stupid and then people are laughing at me and I'm kind of like laughing at myself and I'm laughing at the fact that they're laughing and it's just like it turns into is kind of like cycle of self-amusement so it's not necessary even that other people laugh at your jokes as long as kind of you're amused on the inside and of course don't use this as a way to to be mean to people that's also not what I'm advocating here try to make yourself amusement work in such a way where your self amusing but you're not hurting others in the process it is possible to do both you don't need to always be amusing yourself at the expense of others right so just keep all that in mind follow the exercises and you're gonna have some powerful shifts in how you see the world alright this is Leo I'm signing off post me your comments down below please click the like button for me share this video with a a non humorous friend because we do honestly want more playful and humorous people in the world makes the world nicer more pleasant to live in and lastly come check out actualize that organs to my website right here come sign up to the newsletter free newsletter I release new content on self-actualization every single week I'm really passionate about this because I think that this material these powerful psychological understandings of how your mind works and how life works when you master these you can create a life that's so remarkable that it's even difficult for me to articulate it in words how you can potentially feel you can feel levels of fulfillment and satisfaction and joy and beauty and life to such high degrees that you wouldn't even believe me if I stood up here and talked about it right you have to feel it to believe it I'm really excited about helping you to master your relationships the psychology of making money the psychology of getting your mood into shape getting out of your depression getting the right career into place finding your life purpose of all this stuff when you put all these pieces into place man you're gonna you're going to save her life in ways that you didn't think life could be savored it's quite amazing it's really a beautiful thing so I want to help you tap into that and to do that you just stay onboard with me this is a big goal and like they say don't get something for nothing so you will have to work towards it the good news is a lot of this content that I share with you is totally free it's very deep content stick around every single week take baby steps do the exercise I tell you to do you'll find that within a few years your life will transform you will become a self-help junkie and your optimism for your future will just blossom and the things you feel in your life will be remarkable so sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon you